There's some unsurprising overlap between Transformers names and Marvel Comics superhero names. For the first seven years, Transformers toys were named BY Marvel. (Bob Budiansky in specific.) It's why Transformers have super-hero-y names to begin with, setting aside the weird Latin folks like Optimus Prime or Omega Supreme. It wasn't until Transformers left Marvel that we got guys named stuff like, uh, Cheetor and Waspinator and Rhinox. So, uh, yeah.

But in the grand tradition of Marvel superhero comics-y names, there were Transformers named things like, say, "Venom." And, no, the Spider-Man villain didn't exist yet at the time -- he'd be a few years later than the Deluxe Insecticon, but Venom was also the name of a Black Panther villain. And there's "Ravage," who's also an Incredible Hulk villain. When you have to name 20 Transformers in a day, you might start having to pull from the archives.

And there was Firestar.

(left to right: botcon 2005 flare up, botcon 2014 flare up, novastar)

Transformers Firestar was just a character in a single Transformers cartoon episode about lady Autobots, who'd appear just this once and never be seen again. Obviously the Marvel Superhero Firestar who shared a starring roll on a cartoon show with her Amazing Friends one year earlier would have both the clout and the seniority. But it meant that, well, a toy of Transformers Firestar would always have some complications. When BotCon tried to make a toy of her in 2005, rather than rename her, they decided to instead make a Firestar look-alike who served as her protege. Her name was Flare Up. And Flare Up went on to do some things in lieu of Firestar for a while. Flare Up got to show up in Transformers Animated, for example, in a form obviously based on her BotCon toy rather than the original Firestar's design. And ten years later, BotCon would give Flare Up a second toy. For a while, it seemed Flare Up might just up and replace Firestar in general.

But here we are, three more years later, and we have Novastar. A rename attempt, even though a Firestar appeared in IDW comics not long prior. (You don't have to abide by toy trademark rules in comics, especially not in interiors, especially especially if you don't claim trademark rights.) An actual toy of the original Firestar character, for the first time ever, just with a name that sidesteps the trademark issue.

The toy itself is Moonracer with a new head, new gun, and new deco. It tries to do some different things with its deco that sets itself apart from how Moonracer's presents itself -- there's less translucent plastic visible in vehicle mode, for example. And all of the original Female Autobots were shaped pretty same-ily that this toy can mostly get away with being Moonracer's body with a Firestar head. It passes the squint test.

I liked Moonracer's toy, despite it being pretty backpack heavy, and that means I like Novastar's, too. I do regret that her plastic color breakdowns mean she can't have her pale yellow hands. Her hands and thighs are tied to the same plastic tree, and that tree is the unpaintable nylon tree, so they either both have to be orange or they both have to be pale yellow. Orange is probably the better choice. The vehicle gives her a pale yellow stripe down the side, which helps.

She's the only toy in wave 4, and (short wave 3 Optimal Optimus actually showing up in North American stores) the last major retail Power of the Primes toy release. Novastar comes two per case, so at least she isn't shortpacked. I was worried about that. But I see lots of reports for her across the United States (only at Walmarts so far) so hopefully she won't be too hard to find in general.

Now if only they made toys of Greenlight and Lancer to be Elita Infin1te's legs. Not holding my breath on that.

Masterpiece Dinobot showed up to monopolize my world just before I could get to talking about Power of the Primes Predaking, but now that MP Dinobot fever has died down a smidge, I'm ducking back to those simpler, more primitive pre-MP Dinobot times.

So, yeah, it's TITAN CLASS Predaking! Titan Class is that once-a-year size class that costs $150 and bounces back and forth from being an irregularly-formed combiner (Devastator) to city-sized guys (Metroplex, Fort Max, Trypticon). Predaking is the second combiner, and he's an awful lot like Devastator, the first! Just, like, construction-wise. He's composed of giant blocky dudes who are clearly just pieces to make a cohesive 18-inch-tall robot. It's the same feel all over. If you have Devastator, you know generally what to expect with Predaking.

Predaking's a little less fortunate in this respect, though, because his individual components are ANIMALS. Unlike construction vehicles, which are essentially blocks already, animals are, like, you know... animal shapes. And so Predaking gives you... some blocks with tiny heads and legs on them! They're animals! Sort of!

I mean, this didn't matter to my toddlers, who looked upon these blocky creatures with a sense of frenzied wonder, but a more older-type person might be a little dissatisfied.

For example, the monstrously lengthy thighs of the combined Predaking robot ... just kind of hang underneath the bull (Tantrum/Torox) and the rhino (Headstrong). Those are the two bulkiest animals (in real life), so they're the best choices to go with if you need to have two giganto plumpo creatures, but it's still a visible compromise. Divebomb, the ... bird... is also pretty bulky, because he splits in two. Half of him becomes an arm of the same girth as the other arm, Rampage (tiger). The rest of him is, well, it's half of Predaking's torso. It's his taint and his stomach and his spine and his wings, with Razorclaw (lion) forming the chest. So Divebomb's a pretty massive bird! Chunky!

But, again, the combined robot is the main event here. Everything else is subordinate. And the combined robot is pretty good! I like it! It holds together and can do stuff and it looks nice. And so that's how I'll likely display him, and it probably won't matter that he's made out of the blockiest jungle creatures ever seen.

The set comes with a sticker sheet, same with previous Titan Class offerings, but, oh my lord, the sticker material isn't terrible this go-round. Like, you can remove stickers from the sticker sheet without the stickers TEARING DOWN THROUGH THE MIDDLE OF THE STICKER instead of, like, you know, where the actual perforations are. And the material is strong enough you can actually remove and replace stickers if you have trouble putting them down, so long as you're careful.

Oh, and Predaking comes with a Prime Master figure of Onyx Prime, which is the only way to get an Onyx Prime. So, uh, hopefully if you were completist with those you were already planning on getting this guy.

Anyway, summing up: Good big robot. Smaller guys are an acquired taste. A small step forward in sticker technology in this year of 2018.

Hey, look! Slash got a retool! The lady Dinobot got a new head and is now the 1988 Firecon character Cindersaur!

Okay, first of all, Slash is a great toy. So Cindersaur is still a great toy. So, like, that's still a recommend. The new head doesn't alter the transformation at all, and though the new colors are a little monotonous in raptor mode (without the robot mode's green face and touches of gray), it's still a vibrant-looking thing. So thumbs up just based on that.

But there's more! All of the Power of the Primes toys come packed randomly with one of 12 different cards that give a different Prime-based power. Ten of these cards are irrelevant to the rest of this paragraph, but of the final two, one uses male pronouns and the other uses female pronouns. (the female card was discovered before the male card, and for that day and a half or so, the toy was known affectionately as "Cindysaur") Maybe someone got their wires crossed and accidentally used Slash's pronouns on one of the cards, but the new Cindersaur head is sculpted the way Hasbro tends to sculpt their women characters: there's lips and a smile and some softened features.

Or, we could just take the text as given and determine that Cindersaur is genderfluid. They're male sometimes, female sometimes, and, heck, maybe it changes depending on which Prime Master is plugged in. That's my take-away, anyway.

The two best combiner teams from Generation One were the Protectobots and the Terrorcons.

This has absolutely nothing to do with which two teams I owned as a child.

(yes it does)

But do you know why the Terrorcons were the best? Because they were effin' monsters. Vehicles are essentially little boxes, but a monster has arms, legs, teeth... all these extra things to play with. Terrorcons, then, transform into two separate things you can do things with (besides scoot along on the floor). So, yeah. They're empirically the best.

(i had them when i was a kid)

And now there's a new combining version of them! I've talked about Hun-Gurrr, the torso before, and I got Rippersnapper a few months ago, but since then I've gotten his other three limbs. I'll say right off the bat what makes these toys improvements over the originals: they have working jaws. Other than Blot, they all have working jaws. It's by far the best improvement of the entire set. Like, sure, the articulation is way up all around, but frankly jaws are the most important.

(Blot's jaw does seem to be a different piece versus the plastic that makes up the top of his head, but there do not appear to be any joints to allow the jaw to move independently.)

Cutthroat is the weakest of the limbs. Engineering-wise, he's large amounts of the Dinobot Swoop repurposed. He's got the same thighs, arms, and he mostly transforms the same. The only difference is how the beast mode feet get tucked away. But his beast mode head is hinged pretty loosely, and so it likes to fall off. The beast mode torso doesn't hide very well that it's just a compacted robot mode, and so it looks elongated and goofy.

Blot, other than his lack of chompers, is by far the best, though! He wads up his robot mode legs behind him in beast mode to create a different shape entirely, resulting in this angry grumpy cube. I dub him "Most Improved" of the new Terrorcons, since he's just better in all respects. He doesn't just stand up and hide his monster arms behind him. The monster torso/head folds back, giving him a different robot mode chest, and the fists cleverly transform out of the beast claws.

Sinnertwin has more articulation than the original. That's what I got to say about him! I mean, that extra articulation is nice, with the jaws and the balljointed beast mode necks (at the skull -- it's just hinges at the torso), so there is a lot more to do with him. But he's had less evolution to his design than Blot.

Hun-Gurrr holds together extremely well in torso mode. A friggin' lot of tabs. Tabs everywhere. That results in a very solid combiner robot. I can't find fault with their combined mode, Abominus. He may be the best of the new Combiner Wars-style guys. And he's made out of monsters, yo.

Live-action Grimlock is, uh, sort of there in the movies! He's in about 2% of Age of Extinction, during which Optimus brutally beats him until he submits and then rides him around town a little, and then he's also sort of in The Last Knight, where I think he disappears like a third of the way through.

Thankfully, a giant robot T. rex toy is something that sells itself on its own merits.

If you have any other movieverse Grimlock toy, throw that thing in the garbage. This is it. This is what you wanted. What were those other previous movieverse Grimlock toys even thinking? They are mere boys in the world of men.

Studio Series Grimlock is large and massive. In robot mode he's a little taller by a smidge than the usual Leader Class, and also pretty wide. And he looks amazingly decoed, even though he's really mostly the same plastic color all over and most of him is covered with a metallic green paint wash. It's the incredible sculpted detail and the beefy proportions that make him look impressive, and to the eye it cheats him even bigger than he already is.

It does some weird yet impressive stuff in service of making him look as much like the movies' CGI model. There, he has a full dinosaur head on each shoulder. Like, a copy-pasted entire Tyrannosaurus rex head, even though he transforms into, you know, a single-headed Tyrannosaurus rex. All of his earlier toys unsurprisingly split the head in half for transformation and put each outward-facing head on each shoulder. This toy says nah. He has both full heads. But only one actually transforms into his actual Tyrannosaurs rex head. The other splits open and integrates into his tail.

The tail is also formed out of his right arm (which ends in a spikey ball) and his coattails. These three elements -- the head halves, the coattails, and the arm -- sort of loosely form a pretty good tail shape. It's a better solution than the usual approach, which is "oh hey look, actually this tail pops off and becomes a weapon!" It's interesting and fun AND it means that a third of the toy's mass isn't being used for a weapon -- it all becomes robot mode, baby.

In dinosaur mode, Studio Series Grimlock is the best thing my kids have ever seen. I kind of have to keep it out of view or they go nuts. (I, of course, let them handle it with supervision, I'm not a monster, but I can't have them being crazy for hours of the day.) I don't blame them, because it's a great stompy dinosaur toy. The only thing I think is missing is I wish its head could turn side-to side, or even up or down at all. The transformation prevents it, but I still feel a need for it. This is why Beast Wars Tenth Anniversary Megatron is still one of my favorite Tyrannosaurus rex Transformers -- the full neck articulation.

As with the other Studio Series toys, it comes with a cardboard display stand/background. It's less appealing paired with this toy than the others only because Grimlock is so large. He barely fits against the backdrop in robot mode, and his dinosaur mode is entirely too wide to fit onto the stand. But this is damning with faint praise. He's a large toy, posed on his bent knees to even fit into the packaging, and this is ultimately good.

Beyond those small complaints, there's very little wrong with this and so much right. It justifies the entire Studio Series line all by itself.

Wave 2 Power of the Primes has two the final two Dinobots, allowing Volcanicus to be properly combined. Sludge owes a lot of his parts to Slag. In robot mode, his thighs, shins, and upper arms are the same. From the waist up, he transforms backwardsly, with his front becoming the dinosaur back instead of the dinosaur stomach. Similarly to Slag, Sludge's brontosaurus head/neck closes around the robot head, concealing it.

The original Sludge toy had you fold his forearms up against the insides of his upper arms, with his brontosaurus toes at the elbows. This new toy just leaves this transformation step out of the equation and leaves the brontosaurus toes at the wrists. The instructions want you to bend his arms at the elbows for dinosaur mode, but I think I like them better straight. It's more of a brachiosaurus look, but oh wells.

(I'm going to call him a brontosaurus, since I'm pretty sure the character design is old enough that he's not meant to be an apatosaurus.)

Snarl, the stegosaurus, is all new! He keeps his thagomizer behind his head, but he otherwise transforms similarly (surprise!) to his other quadropedal Dinobot friends. His head's a little smaller than the others, possibly since it needs to hide inside the combiner port cavity within his own chest, rather than inside a dinosaur part. Instead of being flatfooted like the others, his dinosaur hind legs stand on their tippy toes.

Sludge, Snarl, Grimlock, Swoop, and Slag all combine to form VOLCANICUS! Volcanicus is actually a pretty good combiner. A lot of anguish has been thrown about over how wide his shoulders are, but so long as you plug those extra two combiner fists into his abs, it's really not a problem in person. He's wide, sure, but his torso tapers from the waist properly to make it look fine. His wideness merely makes him look mighty.

The other option for the two extra fists is to plug them into the back of the feet for additional stability. He's not going to need this. Well, he's not if yours has the same plastic tolerances as mine. The biggest threat to my Volcanicus's stability is that one of his feet likes to rotate a little to the right, which can lead to him ultimately losing traction and doing the splits. Extra heels would not solve this. Tighter 5mm pegs at the ankle, yes, but not heels.

The major negative to Volcanicus is his lack of a weapon. In the cellphone game Earth Wars, Volcanicus gets an upsized version of Grimlock's Fall of Cybertron sword. You can try giving him the FoC toy's sword, but it was already a little undersized for the Voyager Class toy. Being held by a giant combiner makes the sword look like it's meant to serve cheese on a plate. There's some third party options, one of which is $50 and includes a bunch of extra stuff I'm absolutely not interested in, and at least one Shapeways sword. For the time being, at least, my Volcanicus is gonna have to fight people with his bare fists.

You know, Powerglide, when Moonracer says she'll hang out with you after the war's over, and the war's been going on nine million years, maybe she's just not that into you.

This is Power of the Primes Moonracer! This is the first toy Moonracer's ever gotten. Sure, back in 2005, BotCon made a Moonracer toy but they couldn't get the trademark and they ended up deciding she was Chromiainstead, but this is, like, the first... successful Moonracer toy? In that they managed to design her after Moonracer and also call her Moonracer and also decide that yes, she's Moonracer? It's good!

I like Moonracer. She's always in good spirits, even when the situation isn't appropriate. Also she can shoot Decepticons out of the sky over her shoulder while not looking. She's very good things that aren't following orders or reading the room.

Her toy is very unlike the other Power of the Primes/Combiner Wars Deluxes, so this too is refreshing. She transforms completely differently from the rest. Everyone else's boots open up so you can squeeze/telescope the thighs inside. It's all a bit of shared engineering that Moonracer lacks. Mind, she lacks this so she can have on-model skinny lady legs, but it's still a new approach. Instead, she keeps the bulk of her vehicle mode on her back. It's a massive, massive backpack she has.

She transforms into an elongated Cybertronian car. Since nothing telescopes, the car parts just kind of wrap around the top of her as she lies down. She's got three separate translucent blue areas (a fourth if you include her combiner fist weapon), all of which read as driver compartment canopy windows, so, uh, I guess she's got a lot of driver compartments? I dunno. She's a very long car, is what I'm saying.

Her toy is incredibly pretty. She's very vibrant seafoam green with some white and a tiny bit of lavendar. It's very Nineties Shopping Mall Signage. Her colors are so striking you feel like it's insufficient that she's merely standing on your desk and that maybe it would be more satisfying if you could absorb her essence somehow.

Like other Power of the Primes Deluxe Class toys, her fist weapon can clasp around her torso to become chest armor. ...unfortunately, hers clasps low on her torso, putting her armor around her stomach. She, um, kind of looks pregnant? Especially since the armor includes a hole for you to bury tiny Transformers in. Well, whatever! *shrugs*

Her ankle artictulation rocks a little from side to side, which is helpful in posing.

I like her VERY MUCH, despite the huge backpack. Combiner limbs have run such a strong rut, it's nice when one escapes it, even if there are compromises.

In wave 4, she'll get a new head and be redecoed as Firestar. Well, Novastar. For some reason, "Firestar" is an unavailable trademark.

Hun-Gurrr is Elita One's casemate, and if local Walmarts are any indication, much more popular! I mean, I guess unlike Elita One he's a completely new mold (though he transforms similarly to Combiner Wars Silverbolt), so he's got that going for him. And, like, I know, I had Hun-Gurrr/Grrr/Gur when I was a kid, and so that lure of nostalgia is there. But c'mon. Elita One, you guys. She'll punch your face so hard her arms need smokestacks.

Not to say that Hun-Gurrr is terrible or anything. He's all right! Which is... honestly kind of a damning thing to say, since the original 1988 version is probably the best combiner torso there was. That dude had crazy articulation, man, for 1988. 1988 Hun-Gurrr established a pretty high bar for 2018 Hun-Gurrr to clear. And in some ways he does, and in some ways he doesn't.

First off, you notice that the rear legs of the beast mode are backwards-elbowed. It's kind of necessary for how the torso mode thighs form, but it still looks awkard. Second-off, you notice the big mass of purple hanging under his stomach. That's both good and bad -- Good, because it's fun to integrate combiner mode kibble into the main toy rather than having to attach it later, and Bad because it wasn't actually integrated very well here. It just hangs off his stomach. It's less bad in person, and you're more likely to notice how the deco purposefully tapers off between the parts and the dragon mode on his stomach so you can see a purposeful dragon shape under there, but, uh, yeah.

The ways he does better, though? They're pretty good ways! The original Hun-Gurrr didn't have beast mode mouths that opened. This is pretty ridiculous for a robot friggin' named "Hunger." Dude can't eat! But the new toy does have openable mouths. The new toy also has side-to-side dragon head articulation (or ankle tilting in robot mode), and this plus the mouths... is everything. The original 1988 toy was unusually dynamic, but the new one is just a little moreso because of the addtional head articulation.

Here it is! The toy I was most anticipating in the entire Power of the Primes lineup. And I know it's the one I would most anticipate because Hasbro retailer presentation slides of the whole gaddang line were leaked months ago. At the time, we thought, whoops, the first half of the line got leaked! Ha ha, no, that was the actual whole thing. Power of the Primes is apparently pretty short, capping out at wave 4 instead of wave 6.

But, like, yeah, a sizeable Elita One has been on my wish list for years. I never thought we'd get one. Hasbro doesn't tend to make Transformer women larger than Deluxe. In 1999, we got a Mega (today's Voyager) Transmetal 2 Blackarachnia, and since then we've got... well, Victorion, the 6-member combiner team we voted on and made Hasbro produce. So my confidence in $25-$30 lady robot seemed like a pipe dream.

Because Elita One should be big and stompy. She's Elita One, dammit. Her name means the same thing that Optimus Prime's does. She should be his equal. Like, a big truck thing, and she should look like she could crush you.

But I will also allow "big jet thing."

Power of the Primes Elita-1 (why do they keep spelling it like that) is a massive retool of POTP Starscream. She's got an entirely different robot mode (well the biceps are the same), some new wingtips, and mostly the same jet mode. That's a lotta retooling. The toy otherwise operates and transforms exactly the same. Which is fine, because I really like POTP Starscream. The only thing I dislike about him are the...stickers.

Ugh, Elita One's stickers. Like Starscream, she has them covering the full surface of her wings. I will try to keep them, if only because they add more pink to her color scheme, and pink is very important. If Reprolabels comes up with replacement stickers that have equal or more amounts of pink, then that is what will happen.

or these will fray and peel from even minimal use like these stickers tend to and i'll have to yank 'em off regardless, who knows

Elita One is not quite the giant pink jet I was hoping for, if only 'cuz her color scheme skews towards red. It's an... almost pink dark red she has over most of her body, with a salmony color for accents. These plus the white and black result in a very striking color scheme, so it's not, like, terrible that she's not more pink. I prefer pink and also pink of the cartoon, but she still looks great.

Like Starscream, she forms the torso of a combiner robot. Unlike Starscream, we got the name for her combined form at Toy Fair. It's Elita Infin1te, with the 1. I don't know if I love or hate this. I may never know. It's an ongoing, mercurial process of acceptance and groaning.

Everything old is new again, but with joints! EVERYTHING. Back in the day (1987), there were this pair of Decepticons called Duocons because they were singular robots who each formed out of two separate vehicles. The individual vehicles didn't do anything themselves other than form half a robot. It's like, y'know, Overlord or a backwards Sky Lynx. Battletrap was one of those Duocons, and he was a robot formed from a helicopter humping an SUV.

*freeze frame, zip-fast-forward through 30 years, slight pause at BotCon 2015 to say "huh" at the Springer redeco, finish zip-fast-forward, abrupt stop in 2018, record scratch*

Anyway, now each of Battletrap's two vehicle components are their own guys! Battletrap is now formed from Battleslash the helicopter and Roadtrap the SUV, each turns into a robot, and they're sold separately.

I like to think they're married and that the combined form Battletrap is their child. Like, you know, one of them is J.D. and the other one is Turk, and J.D. hops on Turk and instead of running around yelling "EEEAGLE!" they are a consolidated robotical form. The World's Most Giant Doctor.

I am in awe of the complexity involved in these toys. Like, the other Legends Class toys are.... fairly simple. They're all Windchargers and Brawns, who transform the usual Transformers way of rotating out the legs and pulling out the arms and being done after three steps. But each of these two guys, Battleslash and Roadtrap, have a lot going on. A lot of pieces going on. I wonder how they budgeted this. (probably by making the other guys Windchargers and Brawns)

Both guys have enough parts to not only form individually-articulated robots but also a fully-articulated combined robot form. Heck, Battletrap's kind of got an ab crunch, even. It's kind of nuts. Yeah, a lot of the articulation doubles up -- Battleslash's neck joint is Battletrap's waist joint, for example -- but it's all still very impressive.

Well, okay, the vehicle modes are probably the weak link. Both are vehicle-ish shaped blobs. Roadtrap's SUV form is very obviously 50% a robot mode chest. Battleslash's helicopter mode is obviously a bunch of wadded up robot parts.

Despite that, these two toys are very easy to recommend. There's going to be some kids out there who only have one or the other (I don't think it mentions the combining aspect on the packaging, only in the instructions) and... I think their purchase will be good enough, really, without the other half, but these two really are a pair.